Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory

Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory

Memory and Perspective

Christopher Jude McCarroll and John Sutton

1. Introduction

In an essay in the London Review of Books, the late Jenny Diski describes a remembered scene

from her childhood. Aged 6 or so, she is seated on her father’s knee. Her father, she tells us,

looks just like he does in the pictures she has of him: ‘silvery hair, moustache, brown suede

lace-ups’. Diski doesn’t have many pictures of her childhood self but she’s pretty sure her

remembered image of herself at that age is accurate. The layout of the room is also correct:

‘Door in the right place; chair I’m sure accurate, a burgundy moquette; patterned carpet;

windows looking out onto the brick wall of the offices opposite’. Indeed, Diski had even gone

back to the block of flats and ‘sat in the living-room of the flat next door’ just to verify the

layout and confirm its accuracy. Nonetheless, for Diski, there is still something rather ‘odd’

about this particular memory. She writes:

Here’s the thing, though: I can see the entire picture. I can…see myself. My observation

point is from the top of the wall opposite where we are sitting, just below the ceiling,

looking down across the room towards me and my father in the chair. I can see me clearly,

but what I can’t do is position myself on my father’s knee and become a part of the picture,

even though I am in it. I can’t in other words look out at the room from my place on the

chair. How can that be a memory? And if it isn’t, what is it? When I think about my

childhood, that is invariably one of the first ‘memories’ to spring up, ready and waiting:

an untraumatic, slightly-moving picture. It never crossed my mind to notice the anomalous

point of view until I was middle-aged. Before then it went without saying that it was a

‘real’ memory. Afterwards, it became an indicator of how false recollection can be. (2012:

12)

The scene Diski describes is recalled from what’s known as an ‘observer perspective’. In

this external visual perspective, Diski views herself in the remembered scene. For Diski, the

falsity of this memory stems solely from this ‘anomalous point of view’. In all other respects

the memory is accurate: her father’s appearance; the layout of the flat―a fact which she even

verified in adulthood; and the phenomenology of the mental image is such that it presents as a

memory, not merely imagination. The only reason Diski doubts this memory is that she is

recalling the episode from an external visual perspective. As we will see, the allegedly

‘anomalous point of view’ of observer perspectives if often taken to show that such memories

simply cannot be genuine.

In this chapter we discuss the phenomena of perspectival memory. While surveying the

field, we suggest that visual perspective alone is not a guide to the truth or falsity of memory,

and that genuine memories can be recalled from an observer perspective. Such memories can

satisfy conditions placed on genuine memory. Observer perspectives can satisfy factivity

constraints, and can stand in appropriate causal connections to the past. In the first section we

identify the phenomena and provide an overview of some of the empirical evidence related to

point of view in personal memory. We articulate some doubts about remembering from an

observer perspective, before responding to these worries. We suggest that observer

perspectives may retain other forms of internal imagery: there is no neat division between

internal and external perspectives. We suggest that external perspectives may help in

understanding the past, and question the primacy of egocentricity.

2. Field and observer perspectives

The imagery involved in remembering past episodes in one’s life often involves visual points

of view. When we recall a past event we usually adopt the same perspective that we had at the

time of the original experience. We see the scene as we originally saw it from a first-person or

‘field’ perspective. Sometimes, however, we recall the past event from an external visual

perspective, from a position we didn’t occupy at the time of the original episode. In such cases

we view ourselves in the remembered scene, as from a third-person ‘observer’ perspective.

Nigro and Neisser conducted the first systematic experimental studies on visual perspective in

memory, and their terms ‘field’ and ‘observer’ memories became part of the vocabulary of

memory studies.

Since Nigro and Neisser’s paper, empirical research has produced a number of

consistent findings concerning these differing points of view. The field perspective is more

common. Observer perspectives are more common, though, in certain circumstances. One

robust empirical result is that observer perspectives are more common for older memories, such

as memories of childhood (Nigro and Neisser 1983). Observer perspectives are also more

common for events that involve a high degree of emotional self-awareness (Nigro and Neisser

1983; Robinson and Swanson 1993). Field perspectives seem to be related to remembering the

emotional details, feelings, or psychological states associated with an event; in contrast,

observer perspectives tend to include less sensory and affective detail but more information

related to concrete, objective details (Nigro and Neisser 1983; McIsaac and Eich 2002; Rice

2010).

Another study looking at emotion and visual perspective in memory found that although

there was no difference in reports of emotional intensity between field and observer

perspectives, when subjects switched from a field to an observer perspective there was a

resulting decrease in reported emotional intensity. There was no corresponding change in

emotional intensity, however, when switching from an observer to a field perspective

(Robinson and Swanson 1993; see also Rice 2010: 233-234).

This last point also suggests that these visual perspectives in memory are not fixed. In

Robinson and Swanson’s (1993) study, participants recalled an event from a particular

perspective (eg field), and sometime later recalled the same event from the alternate perspective

(eg observer). However, evidence indicates that one can often switch between perspectives

within a single episode of remembering a past event. That is, remembering a past event may

involve adopting not just a field or an observer perspective, but may involve adopting both

perspectives in the same retrieval attempt (Rice and Rubin 2009).

Even if the term ‘perspective’ bears a visual bias, it refers more generally to the range

of imagery or ‘standpoints’ in distinct modalities that informs one of one’s body, the world, or

even other perspectives (Behnke 2003: 52). There are many different kinds, domains, and

modes of ‘perspective’. Perspectives can be cognitive, embodied, emotional, or evaluative in

nature; they occur in many domains, including imagination, perception, and memory; and they

can be first-, second-, or third-personal. These distinct perspectives and forms of perspective

stand in many different relations to each other. By initially insisting on such distinctions

between different kinds, domains, and modes of perspective, we can then investigate their

coexistence, fusion, integration, and coordination.

The distinction between field and observer perspectives in episodic memory is

paralleled in other cognitive domains: in imagination (eg Vendler 1979; Walton 1990;

Williams 1973; Wollheim 1984); in dreaming (eg Cicogna and Bosinelli 2001; Rosen and

Sutton 2013; Windt 2015). Even in the domain of spatial cognition one can adopt points of

view that are internal or external to the subject. Spatial information can be processed and

communicated from egocentric (route or embedded) points of view and allocentric (extrinsic

or survey) perspectives. In fact, just as an episodic memory may involve both field and observer

perspectives, spatial information is often interpreted and conveyed by integrating and blending

these distinct points of view (Tversky 2011).

3. Remembering from an observer perspective: truth and authenticity

In most studies on visual perspective in memory, the observer perspective is simply taken as

one particular instance of remembering a past event. These studies do not normally question

the authenticity of such memories in which one sees oneself from an external perspective. Some

psychologists studying the phenomena of point of view in memory are interested in the

question of whether, as a matter of fact, more observer perspectives than field perspectives tend

to be false. This is quite distinct from the question of whether there can in principle be genuine

or veridical memories in which one adopts an observer perspective.

We saw that Diski casts doubt on her childhood observer perspective memory solely

because of its anomalous point of view. But if one takes oneself to be remembering, and one is

accurately representing some past event in all aspects other than occupying the original point

of view, what motivates the claim that such representations are not ‘real’ memories?1 Why

would an external perspective entail a false memory? Diski seems to assume an idea which is

also apparent in some philosophical work, the idea that memory should preserve the content of

perception. In perception one sees an event unfold from a particular point of view. And because

memory preserves the content of perception, the remembered event should be recalled from

the same point of view one had at the time of the original experience.

The idea that memory exactly reproduces a past experience seems to put pressure on

the status of observer perspectives as genuine memories. Since ‘remember’ in relevant senses

1 Context and pragmatic considerations change the goals and functions of remembering. Whether one is testifying

in a court of law or reminiscing round the dinner table affects how we think about the truth of a memory. See

Sutton (2003), Campbell (2014), Harris et al. (2014).

is typically used as a success word, memory implies truth: this is a factivity constraint on

remembering. On the view we are here describing, truth in memory is taken to require

duplication of the past. But observer perspectives are not duplicates of the past event, because

they present the event from an ‘anomalous’ point of view. Thus, on this line of thought,

observer perspectives cannot appear in genuine remembering. On such a preservationist view

genuine memories should be recalled from a field perspective.

Yet this cannot be the whole picture. It is possible to accept the factivity constraint on

memory, yet deny that memory involves strict preservation; a degree of change may still be

compatible with truth. This is a point accepted, for example, by Sven Bernecker, a moderate

preservationist: ‘Memory implies truth, but it does not imply that the memory content is an

exact duplicate of the past thought content. Sometimes memory allows for moderate

transformations of the informational content’ (2008: 155).

Further, the preservationist account of memory is itself called into question by

reconstructive models of memory, which emphasise the flexible and dynamic nature of

remembering (eg Schacter and Addis 2007). For Bartlett, who conducted pioneering work on

reconstruction in memory, ‘Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless

and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the

relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organised past reactions or experience’

(1932: 213). But construction in memory should not be equated with error or invention:

malleability is not in itself unreliability (Barnier et al. 2008). Memories can be influenced,

‘worked over’, constructed, compiled, and still be functional, faithful, accurate, true.

A broadly preservationist line of thought lies behind Richard Wollheim’s rejection of

the possibility that I might see myself in a (genuinely) remembered scene. Wollheim claims

that ‘would require that I be represented as from the outside, but the fact that it is an event

memory forbids this, for this isn’t how I experienced myself in the course of the event’ (1984:

103).2 Zeno Vendler articulates a similar worry: ‘one cannot remember seeing oneself from a

different perspective simply because it is impossible to have seen oneself from an outside

perspective’ (1979: 169, original emphasis). And, Vendler explains, this conclusion simply

follows from the truism that ‘one cannot remember doing something that one has not done’

(1979: 170).

On such views, because one did not (indeed cannot) see oneself from an external

perspective at the time of the original experience, one cannot have a memory in which one sees

oneself from an external perspective: one cannot recall from an observer perspective. But

perhaps this is to set an unrealistic standard for what a genuine observer perspective in memory

would have to be—a requirement of having visually perceived oneself during the original

event. We suggest, in contrast, that in order to ‘see’ oneself in memory from an observer

perspective, one does not need to have visually perceived oneself from an external perspective

at the time of the original event. Even if we grant that one cannot see oneself from an external

perspective, one can still have a memory in which one ‘sees’ oneself from an external

perspective.

This point is nicely made by Dominic Gregory:

my own observer memories do not involve its seeming to me that things once looked to

me the ways that the visual mental images show things as looking; I do not seem to be

recalling episodes in which I somehow saw myself. Rather, they involve its seeming to me

that there were once past scenes in which I played a certain part and which looked―‘from

2 On Wollheim’s conception, event-memory as a species of memory for events that one experienced is closely

related to episodic memory. Wollheim stresses that it is an exaggeration to say that in event-memory one must

remember the event exactly as one experienced it. Rather, in a genuine memory one should broadly remember the

event as one experienced it (Wollheim 1984: 103-104). But these broad limits to the mnemonic content must not

include ‘gross deviations’, which include ‘structural deviations, or deviations in identity’ (1984: 103). The

external visuospatial representation of the self in observer perspectives would, on his view, amount to such a

deviation. In response, we suggest that observer perspectives need not involve structural deviations or deviations

in identity.

somewhere’ rather than ‘to someone’―the ways that the visual mental images show things

as looking. (2011: 2)

Discussing the impact of present context on the content of memory, Peter Goldie argues

that what one now knows, thinks, or feels may infuse the memory of a past event. For Goldie,

the content of memory can be influenced at the point of retrieval by present knowledge and

emotion. He tells us that ‘in effect, I remember it as I now feel it’ (2012: 52). According to

Goldie, observer perspectives are more likely to occur when there is an epistemic, emotional,

or evaluative gap―what Goldie terms a triply ironic gap―between past and present. In other

words: what one now knows, thinks, and feels, is different to what one then knew, thought, and

felt. It is the (ironic) gap that opened between the past and the present that affords the possibility

of a memory from an observer perspective.

Goldie provides the example of remembering drunkenly singing at the office party:

feeling at that time a ‘heady delight’ but now shamefully realising that his colleagues were

laughing at him and not with him. For Goldie such a memory will typically be recalled from

an observer perspective: ‘I can see myself now, shamefully making a ridiculous fool of myself

in front of all those people, getting up on the table and gleefully singing some stupid song’

(2012: 52). Importantly though, ‘field episodic memories―memories of what happened “from

the inside”―can also be infected with irony, with what one now knows, and how one feels

about what one now knows’ (Goldie 2012: 52).

That both field and observer perspectives memories involve constructive elements is a

point acknowledged by Dorothea Debus (2007). Debus also argues that observer perspective

memories are consistent with a causal theory of memory: observer perspectives can maintain

an appropriate causal connection to the past. Debus argues that, despite the external visual

perspective of observer memories, the information involved in such imagery has its source in

the original experience. For Debus, the shift in point of view between the original perceptual

experience and the subsequent observer memory results from a systematic modification of the

spatial information available at the time of encoding. Spatial information available at the time

of the original experience—and hence appropriately causally connected to the past—is

systematically manipulated into an observer perspective image. This seems to be the case for

Jenny Diski’s memory, in which spatial relations between the elements of the remembered

scene appear to be maintained through the shift in visuospatial perspective.

Nonetheless, a further related preservationist argument may be levelled against

observer perspective memories. Even if it is accepted that perfect preservation is unrealistic, it

could be claimed that memory should still broadly preserve the content of a past perceptual

experience. Aspects of the original perceptual content may be lost from the memory―memory

degrades with time and forgetting is natural―but nothing should be added to the content of a

genuine memory. In just such a moderate departure from strict preservationism, Bernecker

argues that ‘In the process of remembering, the informational content stored in traces may stay

the same or decrease (to a certain degree); but it may not increase’ (2008: 164).3

An argument against observer perspective memory can then be formulated thus:

genuine memory involves only content that was available at the time of the original experience.

Observer perspectives seem to involve a representation of the self that was not available at the

time of perception. Therefore observer perspectives involve additional content and cannot be

genuine memories.

3 This idea reflects a distinction in psychology between errors of omission and errors of commission. When

memory fails it can do so by way of either errors of omission―typically errors of forgetting or memory failures,

or errors of commission―when details are remembered that were not part of the original event. Errors of

commission are often called false memories, in which one ‘falsely remembers details, words, or events that weren’t

actually experienced’ (Intraub & Dickinson 2008: 1007).

One response to this argument is to urge that genuine memory can be generative.

Kourken Michaelian argues that on a (re)constructive model of memory new content can be

generated. According to Michaelian:

The generation of new content occurs when memory produces content in addition to that

which it took as input; this can occur either before retrieval, by means of transformation

of content received from other sources, or at retrieval, by means of transformation of

content stored by memory. (2011: 324).

Memory processes allow that new content can be added to genuine memory. Therefore, even

if observer perspectives have an additional representation of the self they can still count as

genuine memories. In a recent paper, Bernecker (2015) addresses visual memory and the extent

to which its content can differ from the content of a previous perception. Bernecker discusses

the possibility that observer perspectives may be counted as genuine cases of inferential

memory. Inferential memory is ‘remembering with admixture of inferential reasoning

involving background knowledge or fresh evidence’ (Bernecker 2010: 77). For example, one

may see a particularly beautiful bird in the park without knowing what type of species it is.

Being something of an amateur ornithologist, one then consults one’s book on Australian birds

and finds out that the bird was a Kookaburra. In saying that one remembers seeing a

Kookaburra one is inferentially remembering, because one did not know it was a Kookaburra

at the time of the original experience (adapted from Malcolm 1963: 223; Bernecker 2010: 25).

Non-inferential memory does not involve such inferential reasoning.4 Importantly, and in line

with Michaelian’s proposal for generative memory, Bernecker holds that ‘While non-

4 Non-inferential and inferential memory are sometimes referred to a ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ memory respectively.

Bernecker finds these labels unfortunate because they imply that inferential memory is somehow inferior even

though it is a pervasive form of memory (2010: 25). Nonetheless, Bernecker’s analysis of memory (2010)

concentrates predominantly on non-inferential memory.

inferential memory allows only for the decrease of information, inferential memory also allows

for the increase or enrichment of information’ (2015: 457).

Bernecker writes:

Should observer memories count as genuine memories? The main reason to answer in the

negative is that observer memories contain information that wasn’t available to the subject

at the time of the original representation. But then all inferential memories are admixed

with inferential reasoning involving background knowledge or fresh information. What, if

anything, distinguishes observer memories from other inferential memories? To not count

observer memories as inferential memories it would have to be shown that the fresh

information contained in observer memories is false or unreliable. However, there is no

evidence to suggest that memories from the observer-perspective are any less reliable than

memories from the field-perspective. (2015: 461)

Bernecker suggests that the main difference between field and observer perspectives lies in

their emotional content and concludes that ‘given that memories from the observer-perspective

are not less reliable than memories from the field-perspective I see no reason to not count them

as instances of inferential memory’ (2015: 461-462). Observer perspectives are therefore

permissible as inferential memories because such memory allows for the generation of content.

But even if observer perspectives can be classed as genuine (inferential) memories, and

hence not outright false memories, they are sometimes still taken to be examples of ‘distorted

memories’ (e.g., De Brigard 2014; Fernández 2015).5 Again, the thought is that because the

event remembered did actually happen the memory is not false, and the factivity condition is

satisfied; but because that event is remembered from an observer perspective, and so the

5 De Brigard says that distorted memories ‘present the remembered content in a somewhat distorted way, that is,

as a distortion of the content encoded during the original experience’ (2014: 160). Fernández distinguishes two

types of distorted memories corresponding to ‘storage’ (preservationist) and ‘narrative’ (reconstructivist)

conceptions of memory. The former is important in this context: ‘On the storage conception of memory, a subject’s

faculty of memory has produced a distorted memory when the content of that memory does not match the content

of the subject’s past experience on which the memory originates’ (Fernández 2015: 539).

content of the memory is different from that of perception, the memory is distorted. This

understanding reflects a distinction Bernecker appeals to between truth and authenticity: ‘a

memory state must accord not only with objective reality but also with one’s initial perception

of reality’ (Bernecker 2010: 214). For Bernecker, a moderate preservationist, genuine (non-

inferential) memory must satisfy both conditions―truth and authenticity (2010: 39). We

suggest that observer perspectives need not be considered distorted memories. Observer

perspectives can satisfy both truth and authenticity conditions.

How can observer perspectives accord with one’s initial perception of reality? We

suggest that observer perspectives may be constructed in part from external perspectival

information available during perception. Emotions, thoughts, and images which are

experienced during the original episode may be used in the construction of observer perspective

memories of the past event. Even though these experiences are internal, they can involve

adopting an external perspective on oneself. Recall that observer perspectives are more

common for events that involve a high degree of self-awareness. We suggest that during such

emotionally charged events, one’s literal (visual) perspective is internal, but one may adopt an

external thoughtful or emotional perspective on oneself. And it is from this ‘external’

perspectival information that observer perspectives can be constructed.

During perceptual experience an agent may make use of both egocentric and allocentric

spatial information. Observer perspective memories may be constructed from this non-

egocentric information available at the time of encoding. Mohan Matthen tells us that:

Field-perspective memory presents scenes in egocentric terms—how they look through the

eyes of the observer. Observer-perspective memory is in allocentric terms: it is an

expression of observer independent spatial relations in the remembered scene…Now, we

know that visual perception incorporates both forms simultaneously…In view of this,

many cognitive scientists hypothesize that visual content contains allocentric information

as well—perhaps we have a map or model stored away in visual memory. The point to

take from easy switching between field and observer perspectives is that in episodic

memory, the egocentric and allocentric forms are somehow separated out and expressed

in two different, alternating perspectives. (2010: 13)

In most cases one attends to egocentric visual information available during a perceptual

experience. But non-egocentric perspectives are available during perceptual experience too,

and sometimes one’s attention is focused on this non-egocentric information.6 These different

perspectives provide different information on the same scene: they provide different ways of

thinking about the same episode. Distinguishing episodic from semantic memory, Mark

Rowlands remarks that ‘What is distinctive of episodic memory is the way in which facts are

presented: they are presented by way of experiences. And these experiences, in turn, are

presented as ones that the subject had at the time of the episode’ (2009: 337). We suggest that

field and observer perspectives involve different ways of thinking about the same past event,

presenting the same event in different ways. They involve different forms of information that

are both available at the time of encoding (see also McCarroll and Sutton 2016).

Rowlands suggests that in observer perspectives ‘you may well be accurately

remembering the episode itself…However, you do not accurately remember the experiences

that presented the episode in its occurrence. You seem to be remembering visual experiences

that you could not have had’ (2009: 340-341). In contrast, we suggest that observer

perspectives can be both true and authentic: they can both represent an event that occurred and

the experiences occurring at the time of the event. Further, not only can observer perspectives

make use of allocentric information that was available at the time of the original experience:

such memories can also maintain perspectival information in distinct modalities. In this way

6 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to go into detail on how non-egocentric information may be constructed

into an observer perspective. For a fuller exposition, including a discussion of the cross-modal translation of non-

visual to visual information, see McCarroll (2015).

observer perspectives may accurately represent the experiences (kinaesthetic, emotional, even

imaginative) that one had during the original event, and that are recalled in genuine episodic

memory.

4. The plurality of perspectives

In many cases of memory imagery, one may adopt an external visual perspective and yet

maintain an internal perspective in relation to other embodied, emotional or cognitive

modalities. Yet there is often, albeit implicit, an exclusive association between kinaesthetic,

embodied, or emotional imagery and an internal visual perspective. This is coupled with the

parallel position that an external visual perspective is (necessarily) isolated from such forms of

embodied imagery (Vendler 1979; Williams 1973). In this section we discuss the complex

relations between internal and external perspectives in distinct modalities.

Perspectival imagery need not be consistently either internal or external across all

modalities. An external visuospatial perspective on a past experience is compatible with an

internal embodied (kinaesthetic or emotional) perspective. We can underline the way different

perspectival modalities can thus come apart in memory by considering the parallel case of film.

In film, point of view (POV) shots represent the visual perspective of a character involved in

the action; even though they are removed from the domain of memory they may be roughly

analogous to a field perspective. It has been argued that such POV shots invite the viewer to

take up the position of a character in the narrative the film portrays, perhaps through imagining

from-the-inside, or empathising with the character (Messaris 1994: 33). The visual perspective

invoked in POV shots may sometimes thus invite the spectator to adopt, or empathise with, the

character’s perspective in other respects or modalities too: but this is not necessarily so. As

Murray Smith notes:

POV may be particularly effective in rendering how a character sees, and so enabling our

imagining from the inside how the character sees, but it is not particularly useful in

evoking, say, a character’s joy or humiliation or anxiety. Emotional simulation certainly

does not need a POV shot in order to be prompted. (1997: 418)

Consider POV shots that represent an evil or monstrous character in the film, stalking or

lying in wait for another character. In such cases, even though one shares or adopts the visual

perspective of the monster, say, one’s emotional and kinaesthetic perspectives may be far from

in harmony with that creature. One may feel the emotions of the individual the beast is

watching; one may feel the fear or terror of the victim rather than the excitement or bloodlust

of the fiend. Here, different perspectives can come apart: one shares the (internal) visual

perspective with one character, while at the same time not in any way sharing that character’s

affective perspective, and perhaps even adopting the external emotional perspective on that

character which is held by the victim. The point of view may be visually internal, as if one were

seeing the action through the eyes of one of the characters, but in other modalities―such as

emotional or kinaesthetic―one’s perspectives need not neatly align with those of that

character. This example shows us how a visual field perspective can be coupled with an

‘external’ emotional perspective.

One powerful and disturbing example of the divergence of perspectives within

cinematic point of view is found in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs.7 In the concluding

sequence, Detective Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) confronts the notorious serial killer ‘Buffalo

Bill’. We see Clarice, groping around in the pitch dark, wielding her gun but unable to see,

visibly shaking and terrified for her life; but we see her from the terrible ‘night goggles’

perspective of Buffalo Bill. We are visually aligned with the killer, we see Clarice from his

7 Thanks to Robert Sinnerbrink for this example.

point of view through the eerie green of lens he is wearing: yet our emotional and even

kinaesthetic perspectives are more aligned with Clarice: we feel her terror, her helplessness.8

One’s visual perspective on a remembered, imagined, or filmed scene can diverge from or align

with perspectives in other modalities: there is no simple internal/external dichotomy.

Sports psychology offers further indications of the multimodality of perspectives. There

is evidence that embodied imagery is not exclusively tied to an internal visual perspective.

Morris, Spittle and Watt tell us that:

Researchers have found that participants are able to form kinesthetic images equally well

with either [visual] imagery perspective…and more recent research even suggests that for

some tasks, kinesthetic imagery may have a stronger association with external [visual]

imagery than with internal imagery. (2005: 129-131)

This illustrates that an observer perspective in visuospatial imagery can be coupled with

internal kinaesthetic imagery. The tasks which are purported to have a stronger association with

external visual imagery are open rather than closed skills: football rather than darts, for

example. In open skills, the external environment (the position of other players, say) may have

an impact on successfully performing the action, and bodily form in movement may be

important. In these open skills egocentric and allocentric information are integrated.

Consider the following example in which the professional footballer Wayne Rooney

discusses his use of imagery in preparation for matches:

Part of my preparation is I go and ask the kit man what colour we’re wearing – if it’s red

top, white shorts, white socks or black socks. Then I lie in bed the night before the game

and visualize myself scoring goals or doing well. You’re trying to put yourself in that

moment and trying to prepare yourself, to have a ‘memory’ before the game. I don’t know

if you’d call it visualizing or dreaming, but I’ve always done it, my whole life … when

8 The scene can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQZYz7qR0Fo

you get older and you’re playing professionally, you realize it’s important for your

preparation – and you need to visualize realistic things that are going to happen in a game

(Winner 2012; see also Sutton 2012).

This ‘memory before the game’ appears to involve Rooney visualising himself

performing from an observer perspective: note his attention to external details such as the

colour of the kit. Rooney is using external visual imagery to prepare for professional football

matches. As part of his preparation, Rooney cultivates internal kinaesthetic imagery which

coheres with his external visual imagery, such that internal and external perspectives fuse.

To return to autobiographical memory, in their 1897 survey of earliest recollections

Victor and Catherine Henri note that observer perspective memories are common in memories

from childhood. But they suggest that while such memories present a visual representation of

oneself as a child they are in a sense distanced from any internal feeling accompanying the

memory:

A large number of responses contain the same affirmation about the way that rememberers

see themselves in memory: they see themselves as children, they do not feel themselves

children, they have a representation in which a child appears, and they know that they are

that child: “I see myself in sickness like someone who is outside of me.” “I’m at the

seashore and my mother is holding me upon her arms; this scene appears to me as though

I were far away from it.” Such are the observations that are found in many of the

responses.9

Observer perspectives may tend to involve less emotion or embodied imagery: but this is not

necessarily so, as the following response from the Henris’ survey demonstrates:

9 The Henris’ 1897 paper in French was partly translated in the American journal Popular Science Monthly in

1898. Our quotations are from the complete translation by Nicolas et al. (2013: 370).

I had the croup when I was 12 months old, and they had to burn all the lumps in my throat.

I have a very clear visual image of the scene; I distinctly see four people holding me down

by force, laid out on one side; what I see most of all is the scorching brazier where two red

irons are heating until they are red-white; right now, I still seem to feel that burning iron

approaching my lips. (2013: 370, original emphasis)

On one reading of this passage, it is a memory recalled from an observer perspective: the

respondent sees him or herself in the scene, being pinned down to receive the gruesome

treatment. But the memory is also infused with kinaesthetic and, perhaps, emotional elements.

The memory articulates the external visual perspective as well as the simultaneous emotional

and embodied perspectives: it evokes the fear of the searing heat as well the sense of danger

looming towards the subject, invading personal space.10

So not all the features or qualities that are experienced from-the-inside are lost in the

observer perspective. Visual, emotional, kinaesthetic, and other embodied perspectives may

come apart: there is a plurality of perspectives (Sutton 2010). If we consider that ‘neither affect

or kinaesthesis need be determined by visual perspective, or even inevitably follow it, we make

room for a range of relations between these distinct modalities to operate in different contexts’

(Sutton 2014: 143).

The plurality of perspectives is not only restricted to embodied, experiential or

emotional imagery. As Goldie (2012) argues, it may also involve cognitive or evaluative

perspectives on the past which may be either internal (reflecting considerations at that time) or

external (bearing knowledge that was not available in the past). These cognitive or evaluative

perspectives may or may not align with visual perspective in personal memory: there is no neat

internal/external divide.

10 Arguably the ambiguity between a field and an observer perspective inherent in this description points to the

fact that both types of memories can be emotional.

The view we discussed above that genuine autobiographical memories can only involve

field perspectives reflects the thought that egocentric perspectives are natural and primary. One

example of this tendency to favour egocentricity can be seen in a study on the use of drawings

as a means of lie-detection. Aldert Vrij and colleagues argue that people who draw a

remembered scene truthfully are likely to sketch it from an internal perspective, as if from a

shoulder-mounted camera, while ‘liars’ will draw it as from an overhead or external vantage-

point. Truth-tellers use more direct phrases, phrases such as ‘I saw’ that imply direct perceptual

experience, while ‘liars are more likely to convey indirect, hypothetical knowledge (eg ‘I would

see …’)’ (Vrij et al. 2010: 588). The authors hypothesise that this distinction will hold for

scenes that participants draw, either

From a ‘shoulder camera’ (observer) position, where someone sketches what she/he could

actually see, or from an ‘overhead’ (actor) position, where someone sketches the location

as it could be seen from the air. The former is more direct and likely to be the result of

actual first-hand experience than the latter, which ‘removes’ the participant from the scene.

We thus predicted that more truth tellers than liars would sketch the drawing from a

shoulder camera position. (Vrij et al. 2010: 588)

Yet this way of thinking arguably misses the ordinary mingling of route (internal, field) and

survey (external, observer, overhead) perspectives in spatial cognition.11

We argued above that we think about, process, and communicate spatial information

from both egocentric and allocentric perspectives. Indeed, work on spatial cognition calls into

question any notion of egocentric primacy: ‘The primacy of egocentric perspective has been

11 While Vrij et al. did find that ‘significantly more truth tellers (53%) than liars (19%) sketched the drawing from

a shoulder camera position’ (2010: 592), nonetheless almost half of the truth tellers drew the scene from the

‘anomalous point of view’ said to characterize liars. Indeed, we doubt that an ‘own-eyes’ point of view is

intrinsically tied to reality. In a study on point of view in spontaneous waking thought, observer perspective

thoughts were more likely to be memory reports, whereas field perspective reports included more fantasies such

as seeing ‘a slice of ham hovering in space’ (Foulkes 1994: 682).

challenged by research showing that rats, monkeys, and people on first encountering an

environment immediately form multiple representations of space, in particular, allocentric

representations’ (Tversky & Hard 2009: 124). In studies demonstrating how we often naturally

adopt another’s spatial perspective as a means to improve action understanding, Tversky and

Hard conclude that ‘the deep meaning of embodied cognition is that it enables disembodied

thought’ (2009: 129). The mind is not always bound by limitations of the physical world.

We suggest therefore that external perspectives offer another way to interpret the world.

The intermingling of the multiple internal and external perspectives that one can adopt when

remembering provides a way of understanding the past that goes beyond a purely egocentric

point of view.

This intermingling of perspectives is seen in the anthropologist Bradd Shore’s (2008)

research on memory work at long-running annual religious camp meetings at Salem. At these

camps, older adults spend time watching the younger campers engage in a range of activities:

bible readings, sports, and arts and crafts:

Over time at camp meeting, people come to watch their kids doing exactly what they did.

This effects an alternation between field and observer memories and a kind of blurring that

allows campers to ‘participate’ in the lives of their offspring at the same moment as they

gain reflexive distance… In its subtle orchestration of memories of doing and of watching

over time, Salem provides perfect conditions for the fusion of observer and field memory;

conditions that ultimately inform narrative expression and create a powerful sense of

identification in ‘family’ over the generations. (Shore 2008: 114)

This blurring of perspectives is a fusion that affords a greater degree of understanding of the

past. It may take a mix of internal and external perspectives to fully understand and appreciate

a past event.

5. Conclusion

The imagery of personal memory involves a plurality of perspectives. In remembering the past,

we can adopt a range of viewpoints, internal and external, visual and non-visual, which can

fuse or integrate in various ways. Even in the present moment we have ways of getting outside

ourselves. Remembering from an observer perspective, from an external visual point of view,

is but one way we have of thinking about and understanding our past. Sometimes adopting an

external point of view can help put the past in perspective.

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